My revision (or, Will this Ordeal Never End?)

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I'm probably going to do a lot more revision between now and Friday.  I wasn't all that unhappy with my intermediate draft, except for the big disaster with the DVD featurette.  I'm thinking now that I should have taken Toffee up on her offer to pretend that didn't happen.  On the other hand, I can see that the new thesis really is more scholarly, and it looks like nobody has ever talked about the Sherlock Holmes stories from this angle, so I actually am "creating new knowledge," which is supposedly the point of academic research.  So, yay me!
But still, this has been so much more work than I ever would have expected.  I have never revised anything as much as I have this paper, and I never completely shifted a paper's main point before.  If I've learned anything that's super important about research, it's to really think things through from the very beginning.  I should have done more of that thinking on paper, too, so that I could have gone over that stuff again and again.  It probably would have saved me a lot of time later on.
Here's something I might have used if it had been published more than 5 days ago:

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A Research Disaster!

Well, I can hardly believe it, but my project has blown up in my face, thanks to the filmmakers, of all people. The DVD has a short piece on how they were faithful to the Conan Doyle stories when they made Sherlock Holmes into a modern action hero. I was crushed. I didn't know how to deal with this kind of problem, so I e-mailed Dr. Toffee. She said we would talk about it at my conference (where we were supposed to be talking about my draft). I met with her yesterday, and it's not as bad as I thought it was. She offered a couple of solutions. First (and I thought this one was pretty generous of her), she said we could just pretend this never happened, since I already did most of the work and had the draft finished. I got the feeling that she thought this would be the wrong choice, but that could have been my imagination.  Second, I could change the thesis (I went with the original one, which is exactly what that stupid featurette was arguing.  Doh!).  I decided on the spot to shift the thesis to that Watson-point-of-view idea I had.  We looked at the draft for the rest of the meeting, and she showed me how a lot of the stuff I had would still work.
I knew before this that she was going to insist on some kind of major revision (that was part of the assignment), so I'm not upset over that.  I'm just so pissed off at them!  And yeah, I know it's stupid to take it personally, but still . . .

Anyway, there's some news about SH (the character).  The BBC has a new series coming (hope we can see it here) of Sherlock Holmes in a modern setting (see below), and the article says that "a comedy [version of Sherlock Holmes] tipped to star Sacha Baron Cohen and Will Ferrell – has also been announced, which will be produced by Judd Apatow, famed for Anchorman and Knocked Up."  How about that?  I'm guessing that Ferrell will be Watson and Cohen will be Holmes, but it could work the other way, too, I think.



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"Dr. Toffee" breaks in to say a few words about actors and directors who can't keep their bloody mouths shut!

Just got back from a high-speed trip to Walmart to get the DVD. I raced back home, made a cup of tea, and popped the disc in the machine, starting the making-of featurette, “Reinventing Sherlock Holmes.” It has to be said: Guy Ritchie, Robert Downey Jr., and Jude Law are a bunch of WRETCHED GITS!!! Here I’ve been going along nicely, having my fictional student work on an argument of their film’s validity as an adaptation, AND THEY DECIDE THAT THEY HAVE TO MOUNT A DEFENSE THEMSELVES! Just who the hell do they think they are?



I’m sorry to tell you this, gentlemen, but when you create a work of art and send it out into the world, it IS your statement of its validity. Moreover, it’s a big hit, so why do you care that it’s being criticized for the very thing that’s making it fresh and exciting? You have probably sent a number of filmgoers running off to bookstores and libraries to read the original stories, for which I applaud you (not to mention your READ poster for the American Library Association), and they will all discover, as Rhonda has, that you are not “reinventing” the characters so much as you are giving them their full context to a depth that has not previously been imagined. And having done that so successfully, why did you feel the need to make trouble for Rhonda (and me)? Now I have to advise her on her revision, and I’m especially glad that she is not a real student, because I’ve had any number of them who, when advised that they needed to do a global revision thanks to a piece of material that was unavailable to them during their research, had hysterics and/or dropped the class only a few weeks before the end of term. You wretched, wretched men.

Back to Rhonda.

A Plan of Action

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I'm getting a jump on next week; I just checked the course site, and Toffee has posted the journal prompt for week 9 of the semester.  She wants us to talk about how we "want to compose" our essays.  This is kind of an interesting idea.  I've never written about what I plan to write, unless you count outlining, which she says not to do for this entry.

I think I actually started doing this in the last couple of entries.  I selected Nathan Heller's review/article about the film because it's representative of all the reviews that complained about Sherlock Holmes being too action-oriented to be faithful to the Conan Doyle stories.  I'm thinking now that the point I brought up last time about Watson might just explain the difference; I talked to my father about it, and he agrees (gave me a few good ideas, too).  In all but a couple of the stories, Watson is the narrator, and we see everything from his point of view.  For a former army officer, Watson is also pretty stuffy and judgmental -- a real Victorian, according to my dad -- and it's clear in the stories I've read so far that he doesn't tell us everything he knows that we would like to know, too.  That bit I quoted from "The Musgrave Ritual" is a good example, and I think I'll use that story as my main comparison with the film.  He also brushes over a lot of action, especially travel.  SH really gets around, according to Watson, but the doctor just says that they went from point A to point B (and sometimes the whole rest of the alphabet) without giving any of the details of the trips or describing the places they travel through.  The film, however, does NOT use Watson's point of view, and now that I think of it, I guess I've never seen a SH film that does (and thanks to my dad, I've seen plenty).   I read something in one of my sources, which I guess I'll have to find now, about Watson being an "unreliable narrator."  That seems to sum up the problem I see.  He has his own personality quirks that lead him to criticize Holmes for various things and to praise Holmes for things that he (Watson, that is) approves of.  Watson isn't ever going to talk about things he thinks should not be talked about in public, and he's not going to tell us stuff that he thinks we should already know, like what Mayfair looks like as opposed to Stepney (which he does describe, in "The Six Napoleons"). 

So, it appears that my thesis is being revised already!  I'm not sure how to word it, but it's something like how everything Heller is noting as a deviation from the stories is only a deviation if you believe that Watson's point of view is the only point of view that matters.  Well, this is going to take more thought than I thought it would.

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The Big Deal: Creating New Knowledge

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Yeah, I know I already posted one today, but spring break is almost over (no, I didn't go anywhere.  I'm broke!) and I've got the day off, so I'm catching up with the prompt I skipped last week, which was to analyze the assignment for the research paper.  I keep thinking about what we were told on the first day of class:  the purpose of academic research writing is to create new knowledge.  I'm not really sure how my project is going to do that, although Dr. Toffee says that it is. 

On the assignment sheet, the project is actually called "The Documented Argument Essay," a pretty intimidating name, I think.  Anyway, here's the way I see it.  This is a fairly long essay (minimum 2500 words) for most people, but I'm really gonna have to edit this time;  you may have noticed that I tend to write a lot once I get going.  The essay has to have a few things, I guess to show that we know how to do them, like a bunch of sources and a "survey" of the articles and books on the "issue."  Maybe it's me, but that last word seems kind of important.  The issue isn't the topic, really.  The topic is only part of the deal.  There's also the academic approach.  So, I have to think about my issue, which I think is whether Sherlock Holmes -- which is pretty clearly an action flick -- is a distortion of the character Conan Doyle wrote about.  I've got sources on Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and action films, and it looks to me like I have to go over all of that.  The stuff on action films goes to my academic approach, which is "genre criticism," according to Toffee, who says that it's a kind of approach that scholars in film studies use all the time.  My thesis is sort of geared toward talking as much about what makes an action film an action film as it does about Sherlock Holmes.  In fact, I think I'm going to have to open the paper with a definition of action films; some of my film sources should fit in there. 
And what about the argument?  The sheet says the paper has to have "a well-developed argument that appeals to logic rather than emotion (or anything else!), considers counterarguments, and contains no serious logical fallacies."  I feel some pretty serious confidence about this requirement, mainly because I have a target to argue against in that Slate.com review I talked about in my last post.  Once I've got my definition of an action film set down I need to do some brainstorming about the points I need to make about the stories and about the film.  I think I mentioned before that some of the stuff in the film comes right out of the stories (for one example, there's a scene early in the film where SH is shooting at the wall in his room, and it's drawn from one of the stories, "The Musgrave Ritual."  Watson is complaining about what a slob SH is, and he says,
        " . . . pistol practice should distinctly be an open-air pastime; and when Holmes in one of his queer humours would sit in an armchair, with his hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges, and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V.R. [for Victoria Regina] done in bulletpocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room was improved by it.").

The main difference I see between the stories and the movie is that Watson, as written by Conan Doyle, tends to describe things rather than action, as above.  He doesn't tell us what he does while Holmes is "adorning" the wall, but based on his earlier complaints, it seems that we are supposed to know that Watson was probably trying to get Holmes to stop.  And, it looks like I've stopped analyzing the assignment, doesn't it?  Now that I think about it, I guess I'm trying to think of counterarguments.

The one logical fallacy that I'm worried about is overgeneralizing.  It can be hard to tell when you are doing it; at least it is for me, but since I know I do this sometimes, I'll be extra careful.  What burns me right now is that I'm pretty sure Lisa already has her draft done.


  

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One item checked off the to-do list!

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I can't believe it myself, but my annotated bibliography is finished.  Fifteen entries, and as far as I can tell, all correctly MLA in format.  I'm not really happy with my working thesis, but hey, it's just a working thesis, right?  It's not supposed to be perfect yet.  I went with "Although much has been made of the action in Sherlock Holmes, the film actually adheres to the characterization of Holmes and the level of action found in the original stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle."  Kinda wordy, isn't it?  It's not a breathtakingly argumentative thesis either.  Maybe Dr. Toffee will have some idea how I can spice it up. 

My plan for the next stage -- the draft of the "documented argument essay" (i.e., the research paper) -- is to argue against the article below, from Slate.com.  We'll see how that goes over.


 

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The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes

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Believe it or not, I just read an enormous biography of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and I really didn't have to!  I was just looking it over -- checking out the introduction, the table of contents, and the index, just like Dr. Toffee said to do -- and I thought I would read a few pages, and then suddenly it was an hour later and I'd gone through a few chapters.  I was hooked.

The book is The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes:  The Life and Times of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, by Andrew Lycett, who has also written biographies of Rudyard Kipling, Ian Fleming, and Dylan Thomas.  Dr. Toffee pointed out to me that Lycett is an historian, which she seems to think is unfortunate, although she liked the book, too (turns out she's into 19th century Brit-Lit).  The problem, as she explained it to me, is that when a non-lit person writes a biography of an author, there is less about the individual works of the author, and I'd have to say that's true about this book.  He mentions most of them, but he doesn't do any literary criticism, beyond a kind of review.  I mean, he says whether a story or novel is good work or not, but he doesn't do any real analysis.  On the other hand, I learned a lot about life in Conan Doyle's era, especially about "spiritualism," which was an obsession with him from early adulthood (this fascinated my dad, who has borrowed the book to read himself.  He thought that the spiritualism was something Conan Doyle got into in his old age).  

I discovered something that disappointed me, though.  You remember that I'm a big movie buff?  Well, when I was a kid, my dad rented a movie and made me watch it with him.  It was Fairy Tale: A True Story, about the incident of the Cottingley fairies (two girls who lived in the country took photographs of "fairies," or so it seemed); in the movie, ACD (played by Peter O'Toole.  A great actor -- he should have played Dumbledore) and Harry Houdini (played by Harvey Keitel!) meet them and try to get at the truth, which in the film is that there really are fairies.  Thanks to Lycett, I now know the "true story," which is that neither man met the girls (one of whom was 16-- in the movie, they're both around age 10 or so), and they faked the pictures with cutouts from a book.  When you see the pictures, you can't believe anybody bought them as being real.  

   

See what I mean?  Anyway, I loved that movie (hey, I wasn't even 10 years old myself, I don't think).  The sad reality is that ACD believed the photos were real BEFORE HE EVER SAW THEM! 
Another sad reality is that most of what I just spent a couple of days reading is not going to find its way into my research paper, but I'm not sorry I read it.

A book in the hand is worth two via interlibrary loan

I picked up two books on Friday, and I've already read one of them, but it wasn't an academic book, so I'm counting the time I spent reading it (only a few hours, which tells you how easy the material was) as entertainment/background reading rather than as serious work.  (An aside:  Zemanta is feeding me a bunch of pictures of Reading, England!  Not too relevant, guys.)  The book is The Action Hero's Handbook, by David and Joe Borgenicht, the team responsible for those Worst Case Scenario books.  The book's subtitle is How to Catch a Great White Shark, Perform the Vulcan Nerve Pinch, Track a Fugitive, and Dozens of Other TV and Movie Skills.  Surprisingly, after only a few pages I realized that it was doing something that Dr. Toffee is always going on about:  it sets up a model that I can use in discussing Sherlock Holmes as an action hero.  I know I need to get that stuff from academic sources, but I think I may quote a few lines from this book, just because it's funny.   As far as the RD/GR Holmes goes, the character is definitely an action hero under the terms the Borgenichts lay out in the book.  He has many of the basic "Good Guy Skills" they mention, and if the film were to be set in our era, he'd probably have a good idea how to safely land the space shuttle, too.

Maybe the most interesting thing about this book is that it was written based on information garnered from experts in each area, including all of the skills listed in the subtitle (the info on the Vulcan Neck Pinch comes from a martial artist, for example), and the Borgenichts give a brief bio and credentials statement for each expert.
I'll get to the other book next time.  It's a much tougher read. 

Here's a funny article about movies:

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A QHQ?

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I got a little behind this week (from what I heard in class yesterday, I'm not the only one, and our first checkpoint is next Friday!), so I'm doing two entries in one day.  This one is supposed to be a Question-Hypothesis-Question, and (according to the assignment page) "the first question should be whatever initial research question you've formulated. The hypothesis is what you think the answer is and why you think that. Once you have your hypothesis, you should be able to tell what the next question you have about the topic is."  I'm not sure how this will work out.
My first question was "is the Ritchie/Downey Sherlock Holmes the Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes, or is it a serious distortion?"  Now, my hypothesis.  From what I've read so far, the R/D SH actually fits ACD's SH in a lot of ways.  The big difference I'm seeing has to do with the presentation of SH as a man of action, and a really quirky one at that.  Is that a distortion?  Maybe, maybe not.  I've been reading "The Six Napoleons," and in it Holmes and Watson are constantly on the move, going all over London (from the best to the worst and back again) to ask questions.  So, there's a lot of that kind of action.  I'm also thinking that SH -- or Conan Doyle -- is always secretive about his background.  We never find out much about how he came to be a detective or where he grew up.  His brother Mycroft doesn't turn up in the early stories (I think, but I'll have to check that), and when he does, he's kind of mysterious, too.  In the stories, the focus is always on the mystery at hand, and description of SH is doled out in small details here and there as they occur to Watson (who is usually the narrator).  The film can't help but provide lots of information, since the audience is seeing everything (well, almost everything) of Holmes, and all the visuals suggest many things about SH.  For example, the way he dresses is obvious in a film, but in the stories, his clothing is described most often when he is in disguise.  I also think that the Holmes of the stories is of a higher class than in the film, but I'll think more about that later.  So, I guess that the film is not a serious distortion, but it does have a point of view that is different from a very conservative reading of the stories.

And that leads me to the last question:  Is Sherlock Holmes an action hero?  I ask this because that is the thrust of the film and it appears that the stories support that idea.  Now I suppose I need to begin thinking about what an action hero really is.  

A Fifteen-Minute Free Write

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According to the assignment, this week I’m supposed to do a 15-minute free write to get “everything I know or think I know” about my topic down on paper. I’m not wild about free writing; I always feel like an idiot when I look at it afterwards. Here goes.



Sherlock Holmes relies on logic and deduction. He knows a lot of strange things about different subjects that come in handy. I remember that in one of the stories I read, he talks about knowing where a bit of cigar ash came from because he wrote a monograph about tobacco (what’s a monograph, anyway?). He wears a deerstalker cap. He sometimes uses a bloodhound named Toby to track a criminal. He lives with Dr. Watson (before the doctor gets married) at 221B Baker Street. Their landlady is Mrs. Hudson. He plays the violin when he is thinking, and he smokes a pipe. He also uses cocaine in a 7 percent solution (what that means, in terms of strength, I have no idea, but I guess that the people reading it when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was writing the stories would have understood). Watson is an educated man, has served in the military, and sometimes carries a handgun. Holmes does not carry a gun.
Think, Rhonda, think!
“Elementary, my dear Watson”—I seem to remember my dad telling me that this isn’t in the stories. I’ve seen the old black-and-white movies with Basil Rathbone; Dr. Watson is a goofy old man in those and usually kind of bumbling. He mostly gets in the way, and he’s the comic relief, I guess. My dad likes the BBC tv series, I think it’s from the 1980s, with Jeremy Brett. I think he’s kind of creepy, but he makes that work for the character. His Sherlock Holmes is very enigmatic. He keeps everything as secretly as possible. I guess my favorite movie Holmes is the one from The Hound of the Baskervilles, the British one, could be the 1960s, with Peter Cushing. Actually, he reminds me of Rathbone and Brett. They all have similar faces. And now that I think of it, the kid in Young Sherlock Holmes has that kind of face, too. A narrow, hard face with a prominent nose, they all look like their skin is kind of close to their skulls, if you know what I mean. Weird. Robert Downey Jr, on the other hand, has a much softer looking face, and he is built differently. I bet that he has to work hard to keep his weight down. So, there’s one difference.
The Dr. Watson in the new film is different in one interesting way—he actually gets mad at SH. The others sometimes became exasperated, but they seemed to regard Holmes as if he were a superior life form or something, like they don’t have a right to get angry at him. The new Watson seems to be angry at Holmes repeatedly. I need to see the film again!



Can’t think of anything else. Can’t think of anything else. Waiting for an idea. The dog that didn’t bark, and that was the strange thing. Which story is that from?


15 minutes are up. Yay!

My Research Question

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I almost forgot that I am supposed to come up with a research question this week.  It's hard to think of a way to word it.  I want to know if the Sherlock Holmes in the movie is faithful (for lack of a better word) to the SH in the stories by Arthur Conan Doyle because I think that the character in the film owes a lot to the kind of action heroes you see in movies nowadays.  In fact, there are a couple of scenes that reminded me of other movies, especially the chase on foot at the beginning of Casino Royale.

So, how about:  is the Ritchie/Downey Sherlock Holmes the Arthur Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes, or is it a serious distortion?

I noticed that the film stresses a lot of the seedier aspects of the stories, but I put that down to the modern love of scandal.  The Victorians probably loved it, too, but I think the average person then didn't know much about how many terrible things were going on.  I could be wrong.  We'll see.

I need a hero!

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I'm sort of inspired today by something that came up yesterday in class, which was the idea of heroes.  In an action film, there's always a hero, right?  And what makes this Sherlock Holmes different is that it is an action film, with Holmes as the hero.  Like I said before, I never thought of him that way, but, as you can see from the picture here, he seems to have always been a hands-on kind of detective without my realizing it.  My dad says that I don't know the stories very well, or I would know that Holmes fights and uses disguises.  (Thanks, Dad.  Actually, I think he may turn out to be a lot of help.)  I think that I may have a research question:  is Sherlock Holmes an action hero?

Dr. Toffee says that in an academic research project, you always wind up researching several things (she calls them components), and I guess she's right, because I can already see that I need to know about Holmes, heroes (specifically action heroes), and I'll  probably have to read some of the stories, too.  I got lucky there; my dad has all the stories plus a bunch of books about SH, which means I won't have to wait for interlibrary loans on them.

So I guess the next thing I need to do is look for background stuff, but I think I'll talk to Dr. Toffee during her office hours and see what she says.  I'll start checking out the short stories today and tomorrow.

What do I really want?

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So, I've been thinking about Sherlock Holmes (the movie, that is), and my father, who grew up on Sherlock Holmes (the stories and the TV series), said that I might want to look at how different the character is in the movie from the stories themselves.  That sounds like a good idea, but I don't want to settle for that right now, in case I think of something better before tonight, when I have to post it to the online discussion for the class.


One idea I had was that the movie was kind of like a James Bond movie.  I'm not sure if I think that because of the plot or because of Holmes being so active.  I always thought he was more of a guy who thinks his way through a mystery than a guy who goes out looking for clues and facing dangerous situations, but in the movie, that's what he does.  I'm not really sure where this could go.  I'm supposed to start trying to come up with a research question, and I think I can do it with this, but how do I know whether or not I'm wasting my time?  What if I do a lot of work on this idea, and it doesn't come through for me?

Here I am at last!

To start with, a few words about me.  My name is Rhonda Rhodes (because my dad-- Robert Rhodes -- thinks that repeating initials are a good idea.  However, he only did this to his daughters, not his sons.  Mom could have stopped him; she won't say why she didn't), and I'm writing this blog for my English 102 class.  It wasn't too hard to get this set up, but I won't be sure if it worked until I finish this post.  For my first entry this week, I'm supposed to try to choose a topic for my research project.  I have no idea what to do.  I did a term paper on global warming for senior English in high school, but from what Dr. Toffee said in class, that kind of thing won't work.  I'm supposed to pick something I'm interested in, it could be something connected with my major, and it has to be ACADEMIC!  What the hell.  I don't have a major yet, and I don't have a clue what it will turn out to be.  I'm just taking my gen ed requirements here to save money, since my folks insisted.  Anyway, I guess I should list my interests.  I love movies.  I like music, but I'm not obsessed with it, like my brother.  I was on the soccer team in high school, but I don't play anymore.  My job is boring-- mostly I fold clothes for the displays and run a register.  I read, but not as much or as high quality as I probably should (no, I'm not a Twilight fan, but I like Stephen King).  I might like to be a teacher someday, since I like kids, but only little ones. 
I wonder if I could do something about a movie.  She said that films are academic.  Maybe Sherlock Holmes?  No, I should probably do one that I can get on DVD.  I don't know when Sherlock Holmes will be released.   But I really liked it, and I think that's what I want to do.  Is this 100 words yet?  I guess I better save it in Word, so I can check for length.